Talk:DEWBOT VI Bridgewater Battle

Necessary Repairs & Maintenance & Drive-Train

There are some necessary repairs needed. Also, some drive-train fixes & upgrades. I include these together. Suggest we:

• Pull all pivots. Add spacers between driven sprocket lower 1" bearing. Check condition and refurbish as needed. All treads will need to be changed (they're beat). I will order more treads.
• Remount magnetic absolute encoders to provide better protection to the connectors (e.g., rotate towards centerline). use wire-ties on these and other electrical connections.
• Replace Steering Jaguars with Victors and test.

We should do this Wednesday, 2-June.

Autonomous

Not effective yet. Main points seem to be:

• Sensor for kicking does not seem to be reliable.
• Angles for off-axis shooting need to be checked. They appear to shoot off-field is the robot is aligned to drive along the central ball column. I'll check, but we should test too.
• Keeping in a straight line by blind dead reconning is often ineffective.
• Keeping the possessor off seems to work better (insofar as something which doesn't work can be said to work better).

Possessor

We've got a adequate possessor for demonstrations. In the heat of competition, it is ineffective. We tend to lose the ball or else overrun it. We really cannot effectively herd balls into the goal either. This is an area which needs work for IRI. Not sure the vacuum possessor is better, but let's discuss.

I'll say this for completeness, because I know we've beaten the single roller concept rather hard. But why is it that 1726/1346/2046/1676/1918/33(old 1730?/100?) manage it? They're not all great, but some really do work quite well. I mean, not JVN/Copioli-approved work, but not our "work" either. (Yes, I said 1676. At least according to Don, which is plenty good enough for me. And I think I do remember it...maybe not.) Or 230? Though that might just be magic. Not suggesting we get a bigger stick to beat the single roller horse; I'm just trying to get on your same page. Knowing what's actually wrong now may go a long way to producing a viable alternative solution, regardless of the platform. Though perhaps it's worth re-highlighting that part of the issue seems to be mimicking competition conditions at home. Might be nice to solve that before we start pulling the old design apart.

As for an actual alternative, could the 2669/1583* side wheel method be more straight forward? I honestly don't know whether the vacuum is a good or bad idea for our situation--there are certainly enough good ones out there, albeit quite a few bad ones too. On their face though at least, side wheels seem simpler (to me). (I take it we've discarded any sort of 2438 thing?)

*I don't think these are the best-known teams for it, maybe Foster can help me? I'm thinking of a little non-1583 n>4 (6? 8?) polygon bot that's really good at the side wheel method. You may have shown me the video. I'll look in the (later) morning.--Siri 18:46, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm working on a lower roller (just below the kicker) which can be retracted for going over bumps. Really an evolution of the idea Mike Rizzo was pursuing. Retraction in this case would be purposeful rather than passive. The control to relax the kicker could also retract the lower roller. Arming the kicker would bring the lower roller back to possessing position. Kicking and automatic re-arm would not affect the lower roller position. Can't say yet how it will possess, but riding over balls ought to be impossible. I have a fair bit of this worked out on Inventor, but not everything yet. As always, the devil is in the detail.

Also, I've done enough conceptual work to understand that the installation of a Team 25-type vacuum possessor is probably feasible. This will, however, require more careful ball alignment (L-R) than we currently need.--Clem 1-June-2010

Mirror

Looks really good, but we should:

• Verify that it stays within the frame perimeter.
• It would be good to have a means of raising it during competition. A servo might be adequate.
• A working possessor, or a sensor to kick automatically would be a benefit now that we can find the hidden balls.

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